Archive of Our Own

He’d never looked so small, Ritsuka thought. The guy was such an infuriatingly large presence in his life that sometimes he genuinely forgot that he was the taller out of the two of them. By the tiniest fraction of an inch, sure, but he’d be lying if he said a win wasn’t a win when it came to Hiiragi.

Yet here he was, this giant, in every sense of the word, grey-skinned and broken between thin hospital sheets, plugged with more wires than their sound equipment. The monotone beeping from the machines provided an uninspiring, and often off-beat, backdrop to the otherwise silent room; whilst the boy’s complexion lacked its usual sparkle and his expression its usual shit-eating smirk.

It was probably the worst thing Ritsuka had ever seen.

The man that sat at the opposite side of the hospital bed wasn’t fairing much better, in Ritsuka’s opinion. Hiiragi’s silent counterpart — always freakishly composed, often toeing the boundary of cold and distant — was brilliant in his own right. A brilliance that fed on Hiiragi rather than competed against him. One that didn’t scream its presence but whispered it.

Taller than all of them. Yet now… inexplicably crumpled.

Ritsuka couldn’t stop his eyes from tracing the other boy’s posture. What was usually relaxed was now an elastic ready to snap, the ball of his foot bouncing off the floor as if continuing a rhythm that had been unceremoniously cut short. His forehead was pressed against the knuckles of his interlaced fingers, his face bowed towards the floor and hidden from view. The sharper angle to his jaw created a shadow out of the clenched muscle that lined it, like a layer of armour. Ritsuka wondered whether his eyes were closed.

“Mafuyu says he’s on his way,” he eventually said, attempting to break the uncomfortable silence. Anything, really, to distract him from the machines.

When he didn’t get a response, he added, “I called Yamada-san as we were arriving, she said to keep her updated on how he’s doing while she cancels our appearances over the next few days.”

The other boy nodded, which was probably about as good as he would get even under normal circumstances.

He quickly gave up the futile small talk and went back to surveying his bandmate. He allowed himself a small smile imagining how pissed off he was going to be when he woke up and realised they’d barely made it halfway through their set, especially considering how long he’d wanted to play that particular festival. Almost as pissed as Ritsuka was that he’d allowed himself to burn out so badly in the first place.

It had been a while since he’d felt so worried. So… pathetically helpless. As soon as the doctors gave the okay he was going to forcefeed the asshole ten double burgers and fries. In fact, they could all do with a good meal after this (though Shizu probably wouldn’t need much convincing), and a few days of actual rest. He’d bet his guitar that Mafuyu would be taking a closer look at his own depleted frame — the dark circles, the shadow of a couple of pounds lost over as many months — when they got home later.

Speaking of…

“Uenoyama-kun.” Mafuyu appeared behind him, the door to the private room still open as he stood in the empty space, arms laden with snacks. He lobbed a bag of potato chips in Shizu’s direction, who only looked up when they hit his shoulder with a sad crinkle.

“How is he?”

*ੈ✩‧₊˚

Shizusumi was a child the last time he’d cried. He didn’t remember when exactly, but he remembered where. And why.

He’d been too small, then, to understand why the sky was breaking above him. He’d expected pieces of it, the clouds, the limitless inky black, to rain down upon his head like giant plates of stone. Instead, whatever had caused the world-ending crack, had been followed instantly by colourful bursts of fire. By five hundred hands clapping their approval.

Too young, then, to really appreciate the glitter, the thunderous applause, for the inspiration and hope it was meant to be. After all, nobody had explained it to him.

Of course, they’d all assumed he’d seen fireworks before. He was a kid. What kind of kid hadn’t?

It had been a faceless adult, their features hidden in shadow as another ball of light burst behind their head, that had picked him up to stem the tears with their yukata. He’d wanted to be held longer, the arms under his knees and around his back had made the bangs and claps tolerable if only for a moment. Until his little feet had been lowered back to the ground, the explosions vibrating up his body with each new rocket sent into the sky. His tears, still wet, were destined to dry on their own.

He’d wanted to be held longer… really wanted it.

Instead, he’d wound up back in care.

Shizusumi had never really separated the two events. Even now he’d lost the ability to cry, knowing that it had only ever made things worse. Vulnerability had been the trap he’d stumbled into after the ground had fallen away, and the sky had exploded above him. Only for it to repeat over and over again as punishment for such a show of weakness. It had left his foster parents repulsed.

And so, inevitably, they’d left.

His boyfriend cried easily. Shizusumi was used to the sound of it, the pitch and the pace of his breaths — even the silent ones. He was used to the way his sobs dampened his shirt, the collar clinging to the back of his neck like a kiss born from misery. Except it wasn’t just misery that made Hiiragi cry, which was partly why the sound no longer disturbed him.

As untrue as it was that it didn’t annoy him sometimes, what was true was that in every instance to date; Hiiragi had only ever cried on behalf of other people. Those who’d never cry again, those who wanted to but couldn’t, those that didn’t know how. He’d never once cried for himself.

And nobody had ever cried for Hiiragi.

He’d spent a lot of time watching him. On stage with him, of course, nearby though undoubtedly behind. He shined from all angles, blinding even from Shizu’s place in the shadows. He’d watched him fly ahead, wondering when it would be his turn to fall. Or if he ever would.

Would Shizu ever be left behind? Or would he continue to be pulled along, included in their partnership only because Hiiragi had made it so.

Those doubts had been noise, once upon a time; they’d been violence. Sound and light ripping through silence, splitting the night apart in rage-filled booms and battle cries. It was an expression of everything Shizu himself had never been able to express, had stopped trying to. And he’d been tethered to it in the same way Hiiragi had tethered himself to him and not let go.

He was a little like a firework in that sense, Hiiragi. His boyfriend soared, climbing ever higher and leaving Shizusumi breathless with two feet still on the ground. Golden, like a summer sparkler, like gold paper he’d been gifted with intention disguised as chance, and that he would cherish for as long as it was his to hold in both hands.

Another tether.

‘What goes up must come down’ is a lofty saying, a poetic warning that ultimately boiled down to gravity, to the most fundamental of physical laws. And yet, it really was true for most things, Shizu would agree.

Except when it came to Hiiragi.

But it was that… that awful sound, the one he’d always believed to be impossible, that caused the man to cry for the first time since he was a child.

It was the sound of his tether, a firework personified, fizzling out. Dropping to the floor. The chaotic, unmelodious buzz of the mic feedback.

Grinding.

Asymmetric.

Shizusumi had been told later that the audience had screamed, not that he’d heard it. Instead he could only imagine how it would have swollen the open air, how his other bandmate would have sprang into action at the trigger. A bullet of sound, signifying the start of something, and the end of something else.

Shizusumi should have heard it. Yet, inexplicably, he hadn’t. All he’d heard was the drop, the buzz, and then… the worst sound of all.

Silence.

ੈ✩‧₊˚

“Shizu?”

His elbow slipped off the arm of the chair as he felt someone lightly shake it. His eyes had barely adjusted to the lights, blue-tinted and clinical, before he was sitting up straight again, attacking his eyelids with his palms to rid them of sleep — annoyed at himself for having dozed off again.

Ritsuka and Mafuyu had both left some time ago, the latter pushing the former through the door with threats of an all fat and carb diet for the foreseeable future, and a full day resting in bed with ‘no more work Uenoyama-kun, I mean it!’

It had just been himself and the machines for a while, before he’d found himself fighting sleep.

“You’re awake,” he said, his voice scratching from lack of use. He cleared his throat, Hiiragi finally coming into focus.

“Before you, apparently,” Hiiragi grinned. Weak, but an attempt nonetheless.

“I’ll get the nurse—”

“He’s already been and went,” he said, pulling himself up a little straighter and smirking, a bit more like himself, “But I’m fine.” Something in Shizu’s expression must have implied he needed instant elaboration, because Hiiragi hastily provided it. “No concerns. I’m in perfect health obviously. You really didn’t have to worry about me, idiot,” he said, his voice high, confident, loud.

Fake.

Shizu was well-practiced in Hiiragi’s ability to bullshit. Either way, Shizu knew that the words were meant to give reassurance. Yet all he could picture was the other boy’s body on the floor, the buzz of the mic. ‘Fine’ seemed like an ill-judged assumption, too risky to take at face value.

“They’re keeping you in though?”

“I’m dehydrated. They’re keeping me on whatever these weird fluids are,” he gestured vaguely at the tubes burrowed into his skin, “just as a precaution.”

Shizu stared him down. A silent plea for honesty.

“You collapsed, Hiiragi. You hit the floor.”

What was meant to be a simple statement of fact, instead came out more like an accusation — pointed and sharp, like teeth. The bite seemed to sting, Hiiragi’s smile slowly fading.

“You’re angry,” he finally said, and Shizu’s eyes flashed.

“Would it really make a difference if I was?”

Hiiragi blinked once, twice. His brows pulled together like they were being drawn by string.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I told you to take it easy. You didn’t listen to that. Why would you listen now? Obviously it doesn’t matter what I think.”

“Shizu…”

But Shizu had already stood up. Looking out of the window was slightly more pleasant than looking at his boyfriend’s expression. More pleasant than seeing him there in the hospital bed at all, smaller than he’d ever seen him.

The sun felt warm on his face, not too dissimilar to the beams that caressed his skin from the hot stage lights. It was… nice. He was surprised to find it filling him with an unexpected strength, like the sensation of blood flooding what once was numb. He felt a wall, somewhere, weaken and crumble in the face of such a feeling. He swallowed, following the swoop of a bird as it came to perch itself upon the branch of a sakura tree beyond the hospital grounds.

“I was terrified,” he finally heard himself say.

And there it was. Tiny. Insignificant. He felt it before he felt it. A whole world, a frozen world, thawing as he stood in a spotlight of his own creation; the ice now sliding down his cheek and pooling into his chin. The admission was as horrifying as a gun sitting between them. A bullet wound. Both pairs of eyes on the trigger, both with the power to break the other — if they dared to try.

“You’re crying?”

Shizu wasn’t sure how he knew. Something in the way his posture changed must have betrayed him. He turned to face him again, too tired himself to deny it, only to see similar tracks streaking the other boy's cheeks.

“So are you,” he said, though it sounded uncharacteristically childish even to his own ears.

“Yeah?” Hiiragi replied, horrendously deadpan, “but I always cry.”

Shizu laughed. Properly this time. And from the way the other boy reacted, anyone would think he’d just burst into song. He gasped, the sheets shuddering for a split second before he relaxed back into them, and Shizu decided to join him by his side so that he could reach him if need be.

After a few minutes of comfortable silence, the air breathable once again, Hiiragi spoke.

“Remember all those nights I cried after we lost Yuki?” he whispered, the edge of his voice cracking by the smallest of beats. “It wasn’t grief. Well, obviously it was, that’s not what I mean.” Hiiragi shook his head, and Shizu instinctively grabbed the hand that had begun to scrunch at the linen. Hiiragi took a breath. “But it was frustration, too. Not being able to do anything to stop him. Or worse, the idea that I could have. It was not being able to reach Mafuyu. Not being able to listen to music without wanting to put my fist through a wall…”

He took a heavy, shuddering breath, the machines’ beeping somehow louder than before. But Shizusumi didn’t speak.

“It was losing two people I loved in one go, and knowing that nothing would ever be the same again.” The tears came one after another now, the dried tracks reinvigorated, driven by ghosts they’d both lived with. “No matter how much I cried and begged for it to be.”

But only one of them had ever felt that they owed those ghosts an apology, a future fulfilled. And Hiiragi had apologised. Everything he’d done since that day had been an apology. The burden must have weighed a tonne. That, and the fear that it would happen again, over and over.

Shizu remembered the whispered words against his back. Those nights Hiiragi was too tired to pretend he wasn’t painfully alone, clambering into Shizu’s bed after he’d finally relented. The words he’d let slip past his lips when he was on the edge of sleep. Never remembered.

Don’t leave me.

But Shizu had, always would.

Hiiragi’s head hung low to his chest, his gold-dipped hair hiding gold-dipped eyes, now spilling from the sides like a cup overflowing. The puckered sheets covering his lap were grey with damp.

“It was feeling like I’d lost control,” he breathed thickly, “like I was free falling… without anything to hold onto.”

Ah, yes. Shizu knew the feeling. Knew it like the unearthly screech of a mic, the feedback still loud in his ear.

“...Untethered,” Shizu mumbled.

“Exactly.”

There was something in that. That… frustration that Hiiragi had felt, the one that had driven him to so many tears since that day. And it was true that Shizu himself was frustrated at Hiiragi, like anyone who watched the love of their life ignore their warnings and get themselves hurt in the process, that much was obvious. Even Hiiragi knew, that’s why he cried.

But there was something else too.

Knowing he might have seen it coming, could have done something about it. Were there signs he’d missed? Did he really ignore the occasional stumble during their set, the way his breathing had come through strained over the roar of the mic? The laboured drag in his lungs and his jaded posture?

Could he have caught him?

He glanced up from where he’d been absently staring at Hiiragi’s knees, to see the boy eyeing him worriedly. Just how long had he been…

“Here.”

Hiiragi shuffled over to one side of the bed. He held the sheet on the other side high enough to show him there was enough space for him, pleading with his eyes for Shizu to get the message already.

ੈ✩‧₊˚

Band related activity was at an all-time minimum over the next few weeks. Nobody really wanted to broach the subject, Ritsuka found, but the understanding that they all needed to take it easy for a little while was wholly understood. Mafuyu was happy to have Ritsuka at home more often, and not spending night after night in their studio; even Kedama had quickly adapted to his new working habits — becoming far more confident in demanding walks when it looked like he was getting too comfortable on the couch.

Meanwhile, Ritsuka made good on his vow to forcefeed the asshole ten double burgers. It was to nobody’s surprise that things got a bit physical, Shizu looking on with an expression almost impossible to read while Ritsuka grabbed Hiiragi’s nose, holding firm until the other boy was finally forced to take a single, frantic breath. The muffled wails, as he jammed a whole double cheeseburger and bacon into his open mouth, was a sound Ritsuka could definitely get used to.

And, by the satisfied shadow of a smirk that eventually crept over his face, Ritsuka knew the drummer wouldn’t be intervening anytime soon.